Law Schools

The Law Schools With The Best And Worst First-Time Bar Exam Pass Rates (2018)

Yikes! Some of these pass rates are absolutely horrendous.

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For prospective law students, bar exam pass rates should be pretty close to the top of the list of things to research — right along with employment statistics and average graduate indebtedness — when deciding which law schools to apply to and which law school to eventually enroll at after being accepted. For the past few years, bar exam pass rates across the country have plummeted, and rather than making pre-law students continue to search each school’s website for important statistics on graduates’ bar pass rates, the American Bar Association decided to gather all relevant information and publish it in one place. How incredibly convenient!

Introduced for the first time last year, all of the data is now available on one spreadsheet, and according to Barry Currier, the ABA’s managing director of accreditation and legal education, it will “provide important consumer information for students considering whether and where to attend law school and for others with an interest in legal education” — not to mention the fact that it will make it really easy for would-be law students to compare schools.

Not only does the ABA’s spreadsheet provide first-time bar pass rates for recent administrations of the exam, but it also provides a two-year “ultimate bar pass rate,” which ought to give students considering law school a more accurate picture of how a specific law school’s graduates fare on the exam.

For our purposes, the data allowed us to pick out the five law schools with the best first-time pass rates on the 2018 bar exam, and the five law schools with the worst first-time pass rates on the 2018 bar exam. For what it’s worth, 74.82 percent of 2018 law school graduates who took the bar passed on their first try (down from 77.34 percent in 2017). We’ll start with the law schools that did the best, and this list includes some of the usual T14 suspects.

  • NYU: 97.35 percent
  • Columbia: 97.28 percent
  • Harvard: 96.85 percent
  • Yale: 96.76 percent
  • Liberty: 95.65 percent

Nothing to see here, folks; these people are smart and they know it — they usually don’t have trouble passing the bar exam. But take a look at Liberty, effectively representing the little law school that could. Just 44 graduates took the exam for the first time, and almost all of them passed. Way to go! (It should also be noted that Wisconsin had a 100 percent “pass rate” and Marquette had a 98.80 percent “pass rate” thanks to diploma privilege, a court rule that allows graduates of ABA-accredited law schools within the state to skip the bar exam entirely.)

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Graduates from the five law schools with the worst first-time pass rates on the 2018 exam were less successful. Take a look:

  • U. San Francisco: 33.33 percent
  • La Verne: 31.49 percent
  • Appalachian: 30 percent
  • Thomas Jefferson: 26.43 percent
  • Whittier (RIP): 21.84 percent

Yikes! This is why it’s so important to thoroughly research each and every law school during the application process, lest you waste up to six figures of federal loan dollars. (For what it’s worth, we’ve left one ABA-accredited law school that’s located in Puerto Rico off this list. Graduating in the same year a Category 5 hurricane devastated the island is a perfectly fine reason not to have passed the bar exam.)

Do yourself a favor and click here to check out the Excel spreadsheet for yourself.

ABA Section of Legal Education releases comprehensive report on bar passage data [ABA News]
Bar pass rate for 2016 law grads shows little movement; which law schools did best? [ABA Journal]

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Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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